Jomon period: content
The Beginnings of Jomon (up to Incipient Jomon) - in progress
The Developments of Pottery - in progress
Occupation of space by the Jomon people - in progress
Subsistence strategies during Jomon - in progress
Everyday life of the Jomon people - in progress
The spiritual landscape and culture of the Jomon - in progress
The last stages of Jomon and the Yayoi transition - in construction
Jomon period: Everyday life of the Jomon People
Text in progress
Housing and settlement
The transition from Palaeolithic to Jomon in terms of settlements is an interesting one, and some related questions are still open. We have found almost no remains of Palaeolithic settlements, which is unsurprising: people at the time led a highly mobile lifestyle, following the large herds that would represent an essential source of food. Settlements would have been made up of simple, temporary shelters. What is more stricking though is the apparently rare occupation of caves at the time. It is only during the Incipient Jomon that caves seem to have become desirable residence places, only to be abandoned a while later (and even during the Incipient Jomon, they were never the principal housing solution for the population of the archipelago [1]). The obvious question is why, and no clear answer to that has emerged so far. Kobayashi [2] quite convincingly dismissed the theory that it was due to the relatively cold climate at the onset of the Jomon period, and instead suggests that caves would not have suited the highly mobile lifestyle of the Palaeolithic, but I'm not sure about this. The main characteristic of Palaeolithic shelter was that they required little time and labor to be put together, which is logical from the moment people didn't expect to stay long in them anyway. Caves, in that regard, offer a practical housing solution as they would require even less effort to become an effective shelter, in which case one would expect that they would be occasionally occupied as well. At the same time, if that was the case, the occupation would be too limited in time to leave traces for us to find today: obviously this is a question for the archaeologists to answer
The Jomon people also began building more permanent shelters, houses which function wouldn't have been limited to protect its inhabitants from the weather, but were meant to be lived in. The majority of such buildings, at least the majority found and identified at sites so far, where what are called pit-dwellings, so called because it had a sunken floor which would have required people to dig quite deeply in the soil: given the lack of metal tools, it would have been a highly demanding enterprise in terms of time and effort. They tended to be built in clusters of three, a habit probably imported from their time living in caves, as there would have been probably enough space to accomodate three family units on average. Several clusters constituted a village. Those houses were quite small, certainly just big enough for one family unit to live in them. After the soil was digged, the floor would be laid out before posts were set to support the rest of the structure, including a tatched roof. Villages excavated suggest that the overall planning was very carefully thought out and were often carried out over long periods of time. A famous example of such planning is the Middle Jomon site of Nishida (Iwate prefecture, northeastern Honshu): grave pits, raised-floor structures, pit dwellings an storage pits are each arranged in concentric circles around a central plaza, that is an open, public space that would have been the centre of the village's life and communication between members of the community: this kind of relationship within a village was to continue throughout the Jomon period. This type of layout is typical of the more important Jomon villages, more numerous during the Middle Jomon in the Kanto and Chubu districts; it will change, however, during the Yayoi period and the advent of intensive rice cultivation
Careful studies of those village sites have revealed quite a few interesting facts. Firstly, it seems the position of any building within the village was dictated by fairly strict social rules: indeed, when a building was abandoned or taken down, one would expect that the new one would be built somewhere where there had not been any building before so as to propose maximum stability for the setting up of the posts, but instead, they tended to be built pretty much at the same place as the previous one, with the slightest change of orientation possible in order to make the most of whatever soil was still undisturbed to secure the posts carrying the upper structure of the house. A practical explanation for this could also be that building in those places where the soil had already been digged up before would have required somewhat less work. Also, the content of what seem to be adandoned constructions suggest that material, including pottery, was deliberately left on its floor, a gesture that we can't explain with certainty so far. It seems though, when considered in conjonction with the fact that Jomon people tended to return to those settlements they had abandoned previously, that these pottery sherds would have been the reminder of the life in the settlement and of the laws that ruled space allocation there. On the other hand, very few items related to people's everyday activites are actually found, no matter the care with which pit dwellings are excavated and this seems to indicate that not that much of these activities were taking place inside the houses themselves. What is frequently found however is evidence of a structure similar to an altar, which underlines the potentially sacred character the house, or at least of part of it
We have already briefly mentioned raised-floor structures when talking about the spacial arrangement of a typical Jomon village: they were among the types of buildings other than the traditional pit dwelling that could be found, although less commonly, particularly from the middle of the Jomon period. Such buildings include pit dwellings which floor was paved with stones, surface buildings and, of course, raised-floor structures. The problem with the latter two is that evidence of their existence is much less obvious than that of pit dwellings, especially since, around the same period those buildings must have become more common, Jomon people tended to move to areas that were lying lower than the original terraces and where the soil was darker, making possible post holes all the more harder to distinguish for archaeologists: it is often the remains of hearths that give the previous existence of buildings away. However, those new terrains are, by their nature, also more suscetible to conserve organic matters, and it is in those circumstances that some of the most astounishing discoveries have been made, including Middle Jomon timber revealing that a large raised-floor building must have existed at that place. It is not known for sure what purpose did those especially large structures serve, although it seems our best guess would be that they were similar to communal halls, in particular since only one or two were built in a given village
Another aspect of Jomon life that the study of these buildings reveal is that of their occupation of space. For one, it seems that the principle of duality ruled over the spacial organisation, not only of houses within a village, but of the disposition of some of the shell middens and other deposits, in particular of pottery. Also, larger buildings, which we have already talked about, tended to be built in pairs. There's also one instance, at the site of Fudodo, in Toyama prefecture (central Honshu), where there was one large building but remains of the stone hearths revealed that the duality principle was applied inside, through round- and rectangular-shaped hearths. To those evidence must be added the clear application of a duality principle in graveyards notably - that it is applied both to the living and the dead lead us to believe that it must have played a fundamental role in the social organisation. It seems, based on settlements having been excavated so far, particularly strong in terms of architecture from the Initial to the Middle Jomon, but was still present later on
Also, the model of a village that we have seen above is not the only type of space planning within a village that existed: it only applies to large settlements, and those were, overall, pretty rare. Certainly, a number of them amounted to hundreds of pit dwellings, but research since the 70s has revealed that only part of them were occupied at any given time. Not only that, but not all settlements could be described as villages: many consisted of only one or two pit buildings, other none, with just limited material evidence that people had lived there at all. Also, the artefacts indicate that some settlements were probably site of production of a specifc commodity, and therefore probably weren't meant to be inhabitated all year round. This tells us that each community's territory was probably constituted by a kind of network of sites, each serving a specific purpose depending on the resources in the area
Other aspects of everyday life
We have already seen how the Jomon people were able early on to process plant food even when those processes were quite complex as well as time-consuming; we've also referred to the fact that the same constations can be applied to lacquerware. The latter required at least some level of sedentarism and was present at many sites from the Early Jomon period onwards with a peak of craftmanship during the Late and Final Jomon. More recently, research at waterlogged sites have revealed evidence of fabric, which led to the conclusion that contrary to what had been thought for a long time, Jomon people weren't necessarily clothed essentially of leather and fur, but would also weave plant-based textiles, and that starting from the Early Jomon (Habu, 2004: 215-218); remanants of basketry as early as the Middle Jomon have also been occasionally found
Some items required materials that would only be found at specific locations. Obsidian in particular was one such materials: very useful in the fabrication of a number of tools, there are some 40 sources known throughout the archipelago. Study of the distribution patterns at various sites throughout Japan have indicated that, starting around the time of transition between Early and Middle Jomon, they would probably transit through a small number of settlements serving as trading centres. These seemed to have also existed regarding the trade of jade. Identified jade sources were very rare: in fact, most of the jade from the Jomon period came from a couple of sources located in the same area called Itoigawa (Honshu, western coast). While the earliest jade artefact dates to the Early Jomon, it becomes really popular in the subsequent Middle Jomon: what appear as production centres, if the number of stones and the tool assemblages are anything to go buy were located with 40 km of the source, while a few large settlements would have been trading centres. Jade trading was much rarer in the Late Jomon before picking up again during the Final Jomon, only this time, production centres can be found much further afield: therefore, the long distance exchange networks must have concerned unworked stones rather than the finished product
Jomon people were hunter-gatherers but their culture was complex nonetheless. One might therefore wonder if, as is the case with some populations of Northern America, they developed some level of social stratification despite their hunter-gatherers economy. It has been argued that they had, and several finds, in particular regarding grave goods (some bodies had notably been burried with accessories that would have been impossible to take off and put back on again, suggesting that they were constatly worn making them unsuitable for any type of hard work, and therefore privileged) seem to attest to it. But there's not enough evidence to ascertain it for sure, so one may wish to remain cautious regarding this aspect of Jomon's life and organisation
[1] Keally, Charles T., "A Criticism of Wikipedia: Wikipedia and Japanese Archaeology", 2007-2008. On the other hand, Kobayashi (2004: 98-103) seems to imply that caves were, for a while at the onset of the Jomon period, a favored housing solution
[2] Kobayashi, Tatsuo, "Jomon Reflections" (see bibliography)